In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

by Marcel Proust

  In any case, Swann was blind not only to the gaps in Odette’s education, but also to her poverty of mind. Indeed, when she told one of her silly stories, he would listen to her full of an obliging, cheerful, even admiring attentiveness, which could only be explained by his finding her still sexually arousing; whereas, in the same conversation, Odette’s inveterate way was to lend a perfunctory ear, bored or impatient, to anything subtle or even profound that he might say, to half-ignore and at times sharply contradict him. It must be supposed that, in many marriages, such subservience of the outstanding to the vulgar is the rule, for one need only think of the opposite case, that of the gifted wives who smilingly defer to their crass boor of a husband as he crushes their nicest conceits, then gush with loving indulgence at the inept buffoonery which he thinks is humour. Among the other reasons which at that time prevented Odette from being accepted in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, it must be said that a series of scandals had lately caused another shift in the patterns of the social kaleidoscope. Certain women, with whom people had been mixing without suspecting anything untoward, turned out to be common prostitutes and English spies. For a while, it was going to be expected, or so it was believed, that the only acceptable people would be those who were of unimpeachable respectability. Odette stood for everything which had just been shunned, but which (as people do not change overnight, but seek to continue a former state of affairs in the guise of a new one) was soon going to be welcomed back with open arms, having slightly altered its forms, thus enabling society to fool itself into believing it was no longer the same as it had been before the scandal. However, at that time Odette bore too close a resemblance to society’s lately exposed ladies. The elegant are nothing if not short-sighted – at the very moment when, having ostracized all the Jewish ladies of their acquaintance, they are looking about for other ladies with whom to replace them, they suddenly notice a new-comer who turns up like an orphan in the storm, but who happens to be Jewish too; it is the novelty of her which prevents them from seeing in her what they had seen, but chosen to abhor, in her predecessors. She requires no one to have no other gods before hers; and she is adopted. In the days when I was making my first entry into the world of Mme Swann, though the problem was not anti-Semitism, she was of a kind with those who were to be kept at a distance, for a time.

  As for Swann, he would often visit some of his former set, all of whom belonged of course to the most elegant society. However, if he ever spoke to us of the people he had been to see, I noticed that his choice among his former acquaintances was influenced by the same semi-artistic, semi-historical sense which informed his taste as a collector. When I realized that the reason why he was particularly fond of this or that great lady who had come down in the world was that she had been Liszt’s mistress, or that Balzac had dedicated a novel to her grandmother, just as he would buy a drawing if it was mentioned in Chateaubriand, I began to suspect that we had substituted for the misleading Combray Swann, the middle-class man without social connections, another Swann who was just as misleading, the man about town who belonged to the best circles. To be on friendly terms with the Comte de Paris means nothing. Plenty of men who are the friends of princes will never be accepted in self-respecting drawing-rooms. Princes know they are princes, are not snobbish and in any case see themselves as being so far above anyone who is not of their blood that those beneath them, the middle classes and peers of the realm, appear to be almost of the same rank.

  However, the pleasure Swann derived from his social contacts was not just the straightforward kind enjoyed by the cultivated man with an artistic bent who restricts himself to society as it is constituted, and enjoys his familiarity with the names engraved in it by the past and still legible now. He also took a rather vulgar enjoyment in making as it were composite posies out of disparate elements, bringing together people from very different backgrounds. These experiments in the sociology of entertainment, which is how he saw them, did not have exactly the same effect – or rather did not have a constant effect – on all the ladies who visited his wife. He would say with a laugh to Mme Bontemps, ‘I’m thinking of having the Cottards to dinner with the Duchesse de Vendôme,’ looking like a gourmet whose mouth waters at the novel undertaking of adding Cayenne pepper to a particular sauce instead of the usual cloves. But this design of Swann’s, though it would certainly strike the Cottards as entertaining, was calculated to appear quite outrageous to Mme Bontemps. She, having herself only recently been introduced by the Swanns to the Duchesse de Vendôme, and having deemed this occurrence to be as pleasing as it was natural, had found that impressing the Cottards by telling them all about it had been not the least of the pleasures it afforded her. But like those who, as soon as their own names figure in the latest Honours List, would like to see the supply of such decorations run dry, Mme Bontemps would have been better pleased if, after she had been presented to the Duchesse de Vendôme, nobody else from her circle could be. She secretly cursed Swann for the warped taste with which, merely to satisfy a misplaced aesthetic curiosity, he had wantonly squandered all the kudos she had seen reflected in the eyes of the Cottards as she told them about the Duchesse de Vendôme. Would she even have the heart to tell her own husband that Professor Cottard and his wife were now to partake of the very pleasure which she had assured him was unique to themselves? If the Cottards could only learn that their invitation was not seriously meant, but had been sent just for fun! The fact was that the Bontemps had been sent their invitation for exactly the same reason; but then Swann, who had borrowed from the aristocracy Don Juan’s undying gift for fooling each of two commonplace women into believing she is the only one he really loves, had assured Mme Bontemps that to dine with a woman such as the Duchesse de Vendôme, no one could be better qualified than herself. ‘Yes’ Mme Swann said some weeks later, ‘we’re thinking of having the Duchesse de Vendôme with the Cottards. My husband thinks it’s a conjugation that might produce some quite entertaining results’ Though Odette had retained from her days in ‘the little clan’ some habits dear to Mme Verdurin, like shouting so as to be heard by all the ‘regulars’, she had also picked up words such as ‘conjugation’ dear to the Guermantes set, which, as the moon does to the sea, exercised its power on her from a distance without her knowing it – and without her coming any closer to it, either. ‘Yes,’ Swann said, ‘the Cottards with the Duchesse de Vendôme – that should be good fun, don’t you think?’ To which Mme Bontemps replied tartly, ‘I think it’s quite preposterous! It’s playing with fire, nothing good will come of it and it will serve you right!’ In fact, she and her husband37 were also invited to the dinner in question, as was the Prince d’Agrigente; and both Mme Bontemps and Dr Cottard took to describing the event in two different ways, depending on the identity of those to whom they described it. To the first group, Mme Bontemps on the one hand and Dr Cottard on the other both replied casually when asked who else had been there, ‘Oh, just the Prince d’Agrigente. It was very restricted, you know, very select.’ The other group were those who might be better informed than the first – one of them had even asked Cottard, ‘But surely the Bontemps were there as well? – Ah, yes, I’d forgotten them,’ Cottard replied, with a blush and a mental note to classify this person as a pernicious gossip. For the benefit of this second group, both Mme Bontemps and Dr Cottard, quite independently of each other, had a version which was identical in plot, but in which their names featured in reverse order. Dr Cottard’s version ran like this: ‘Well, there were our hosts, of course, then the Vendômes, the Duc and Duchesse, don’t you know, and (here he gave a smug smile) Professor and Mme Cottard. Oh yes, and there was another couple there too, though nobody could work out why – M. and Mme Bontemps, sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb!’ Mme Bontemps rattled off exactly the same speech, except that the gloating intonation stressed the place of her husband and herself between the Duchesse de Vendôme and the Prince d’Agrigente, while the disreputables who she went so far as to say had gate-crashed the
event, and who were such flagrant outsiders, were the Cottards.

  When Swann came home from his afternoon out, it was often shortly before dinner-time. At six in the evening, which had once been the hour of such sadness for him, he no longer wondered what Odette might be up to; he was now almost indifferent to whether she had someone with her or whether she had gone out somewhere. Now and again it did occur to him that there had been a time, many years before, when he had tried to decipher a letter from Odette to Forcheville through its envelope. But he found this memory irksome; and to avoid the full sense of the shame it brought, he preferred to twitch the corners of his mouth, or even give a little shake of the head, as though to say, ‘Well, so what?’ He had, however, come to see as unfounded the notion which he had often entertained in those former days, that Odette’s daily doings were quite innocent, and that it was only the dark figments of his jealousy which sullied them (a beneficent notion, in fact, since it had soothed his anguish, for the duration of his love-sickness, by whispering that it was imaginary); and he now believed that it was the jealousy which had been right all along, that though she might well have loved him more than he had given her credit for, she had also been much more often unfaithful to him than he had liked to believe. In those days, wallowing in his grief, he had promised himself that when he had stopped loving her, when he would no longer care about annoying her, or making her feel importuned by being loved too much, he would enjoy sitting down with her and finding out, in a spirit of simple respect for the truth, as a mere point of historical fact, whether or not Forcheville had been in bed with her on the day when Swann had rung her doorbell, then banged on her window, and she had not come to the door at first but had later sent the note to Forcheville saying it was an uncle of hers who had turned up. But this fascinating problem, which Swann was looking forward to solving as soon as his jealousy had abated, stopped fascinating him when he stopped being jealous. This did not happen instantly. There was a time when, though Odette herself no longer aroused his jealousy, he could still be plunged back into its throes by the thought of that afternoon when he had stood outside the little hôtel in the rue La Pérouse banging on the door.38 It was as though his jealousy, after the manner of those illnesses which seem to have their seat or source of contagion more in certain places, certain houses, than in certain individuals, had not focussed so much on Odette as on that past day, that long-lost moment when Swann had stood knocking at all the entrances of her house. It was as though that single day, or that evening hour, had had the power of fossilizing a few last particles of the loving personality which had once been his, and which he could only ever retrieve at that point in time. He had long since ceased to care whether Odette had been unfaithful to him, and even whether her infidelities continued to this day. Yet over a period of some years, attempting to assuage those persistent pangs of unrequited curiosity, he had gone on seeking out former servants of Odette’s, in the hope of learning whether at six o’clock on that day,39 so long ago, she had been in bed with Forcheville. Then even the curiosity had faded; but his investigations continued. He persisted in trying to find out something in which he no longer had any interest, because his former self, albeit now in the final stages of its senility, went on functioning mechanically, at the urge of a preoccupation so extinct that Swann could no longer even imagine his former anguish, though it had once been so acute that he could not imagine ever being rid of it, and the death of the woman he loved had seemed the only thing capable of clearing a way for him through the grief-encumbered years ahead. (Yet the pain of jealousy, as a cruel counter-demonstration will show in a later part of this book, is proof even against death.)

  To know the truth of what it was in Odette’s life that had caused him such pain had not been Swann’s only longing. He had nursed another deep desire: to avenge that pain at a time when, having survived his love for Odette, he would no longer live in fear of her. The opportunity of enjoying this revenge was now to hand, since Swann was in love with another woman, a woman who, though she gave him no grounds for jealousy, made him jealous all the same, since in his inability to find new ways of loving he put to use again with the other woman the way that had once served him with Odette. For his jealousy to revive, it was not necessary for this woman to be unfaithful; all that was required was that for some reason she had been away from him, at a dinner perhaps, and had apparently enjoyed herself. This roused all his old anguish, the sad counter-productive excrescence of his love, and deflected Swann away from the real woman into a compulsion to find out the truth about her feelings for him, the concealed cravings that made up her daily life, the secrets of her heart; for, between him and the woman he loved, the anguish set a solid, irreducible mass of once-harboured suspicions originating in Odette, or possibly in some other woman who had preceded Odette, and which obliged the ageing lover to relate to his present mistress through the ancient collective figment in which he arbitrarily embodied his new love: The Woman Who Made Him Jealous. Swann often suspected that this jealousy misled him into believing in non-existent infidelities; but then he would remember that he had once been misled into giving Odette the benefit of this very doubt. So, whenever the young woman he loved was away from him, whatever it was she happened to be doing came to lose all semblance of innocence. But whereas long ago, foreseeing a possible day when he might have stopped loving the woman who he did not know would one day become his wife, he had sworn to flaunt the full sincerity of his indifference to her, to avenge the self-esteem which she had for so long humiliated, now that he could slake this thirst for vengeance with impunity (since what did it matter to him if Odette took him at his word and deprived him of her company, which had once been so necessary to him?), he could not be bothered taking his revenge. When his love for her had ended, the desire to show her that his love for her had ended had also disappeared. And the Swann who, when he suffered because of Odette, had wished for the day when he might let her see him in love with someone else, took ingenious precautions, now that this was possible, to keep his wife in ignorance of his new affair.